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SOPA is Piracy

Today Wednesday the 18th of January 2012 is the internet’s day of virtual protest against the SOPA piracy laws that if approved will be the end of the net as we know it, including this blog and most of the sites that make it something more than another corporate-controlled medium.

SOPA is to internet piracy what the War on Terror is to terrorism: a nominal excuse to further erode human rights and citizen freedoms, in this case the right to free speech. To paraphrase Arundhati Roy, just as war is terror, SOPA is piracy. Piracy by corporate interests as they launch the grappling hooks and prepare to board the vessel of the free internet with the might of the system behind them.

Why should a humble non-profit homecooked blog like this one be worried about the SOPA legislation? After all, we have nothing to do with downloads, licit or illicit, so it doesn’t affect us, right?

Wrong. The corporate powers will wield SOPA against their competition, the blogosphere, such that hundreds of thousands of blogs like this one will disappear forever. Technically, if one single WordPress blog were to be linked with “piracy”, WordPress itself could be forced to shut down. Ditto for Blogspot and other blog servers, and even the big search engines… who hasn’t accidentally stumbled upon links to pirate downloads on Google?

Obviously, Google is not going down, because the search engines are not the target of this proposed corporate statute. The real target are the alternative news sources and other “dangerous” blogs that provide information outside the official narrative. There are too many to name, and between them they reach millions of readers everyday. The corporate privateers cannot compete on a level field –they never have been able to– and so SOPA sets sail under its own foul wind.

There is a war going on for the word, and corporate shilldom is getting its asset whupped, so now they’re bringing out the big guns. Let the privateers know that they better aim good and send this vessel straight to Davy Jone’s Locker, because if they try to board, they will dance the hempen jig like the bilge rats they are, and may god have mercy on their corporate bitch souls. No quarter, hearties. No quarter.